Folder aggregation in Folder view

[Skywatcher]

Hello Simon,

First of all, congratulations on the awesome work with minimserver/minimstreamer, happy user here.

The thread subject is not very descriptive but couldn't think of a better one.
I have a feature suggestion that I have no idea on how easy it'd be to implement or even how much interest would there be from other people on having it. Anyway, it doesn't hurt to ask.

I use mainly Folder view since I have my collection hierarchically organised in paths like music/classical/composer/album/tracks or music/world/artist/album/tracks and I don't have such good tagging (It's an objective but it's going to take a long time). I felt the need to separate the several genres (and even rock into A-M and N-Z between the genre and the artist) because a folder with a lot of subfolders was just making my HDD very sluggish whenever it was trying to list the contents. So with minimserver or any other server I had to keep waiting for a long time when I wanted to list the artists folders. Since I separated them it's a lot faster listing everything.

The problem is, as you can imagine, that now in folder view I see several folders (genres) and inside the biggest genres I then see alphabetical division, and only then the artists (and only the ones that stat with those letters).
I use another application to have access to my music from work (not a DLNA/UPnP server) that gives me access to my music and then streams it in MP3 all via web browser. It's not what I want at home, obviously, but I only refer it here because it has this very nice feature that it only lists the directories/folders from the point that I selected onwards.
I.e., if I select to share:
music/classical/ and
music/world and
music/rock/A-M and
music/rock/N-Z

the only thing I see in Folder view is a big list with all the composers and artists, because it only lists from that share point onwards, hence I see the subfolders inside each one of those 4 folders all in a single list.

If I did the same in minim server (and I did ) I would get 4 folders (classical, world, A-M and N-Z). In order to have that single list I'd have to add each artist/composer folder to the contentDir fields through minimwatch which would be kind of crazy.

I don't know if I was clear, if not, please ask and I'll re-write it in some other way. I don't know if you'd have any interest on implementing it, but if you did, I'd really appreciate it.

Cheers,

[simoncn]

(29-03-2014 02:05)Skywatcher Wrote:  I don't know if I was clear, if not, please ask and I'll re-write it in some other way. I don't know if you'd have any interest on implementing it, but if you did, I'd really appreciate it.

I understand what you are requesting. The code to handle multiple contentDir settings is quite complex, and the code to handle folder view is also quite complex. It's very unlikely that I would rewrite these two pieces of complex code to support what you are describing.

The right solution is to browse using tags instead of (or as well as) folders. This provides much more flexibility to browse your library in many different ways using the Intelligent Browsing capabilities of MinimServer.

Another option if you are running MinimServer on a Linux machine is to use symbolic links to create a customized view of a subset of your library. It should be possible to write a script that scans a set of folders to find all their subfolders and creates an aggregated flat list of symbolic links to these subfolders in some other "custom view" folder. You can then use the "custom view" folder as the contentDir value to get what you want.

[Skywatcher]

(29-03-2014 10:22)simoncn Wrote:  

(29-03-2014 02:05)Skywatcher Wrote:  I don't know if I was clear, if not, please ask and I'll re-write it in some other way. I don't know if you'd have any interest on implementing it, but if you did, I'd really appreciate it.

I understand what you are requesting. The code to handle multiple contentDir settings is quite complex, and the code to handle folder view is also quite complex. It's very unlikely that I would rewrite these two pieces of complex code to support what you are describing.

Fair enough. I was just hoping it could be a quick & easy implementation.

Quote:The right solution is to browse using tags instead of (or as well as) folders. This provides much more flexibility to browse your library in many different ways using the Intelligent Browsing capabilities of MinimServer.

Totally agree with you on that one. I'll just have to sort the mess of inconsistencies that is my current tagging. It's just not going to be fast.

Quote:Another option if you are running MinimServer on a Linux machine is to use symbolic links to create a customized view of a subset of your library. It should be possible to write a script that scans a set of folders to find all their subfolders and creates an aggregated flat list of symbolic links to these subfolders in some other "custom view" folder. You can then use the "custom view" folder as the contentDir value to get what you want.

Hmmmm... what an interesting idea. I'll have to play around with that a bit. Nice one, sir.

Cheers and thank you for replying.